Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Best quality coffee

We visited the Doka Coffee Estate which has been around and owned by the same family for 3 generations. It was a great tour and we learned a lot about all of their processes of growing and making coffee. Costa Rica is the only country that uses this one type of plant only - making their coffee the highest quality than anywhere else. They also have 3 separate qualities of coffee that come out. Unfortunately, the 3rd quality is sold mostly within Costa Rica, so much of the coffee we get down here is not great. We did have some of the first quality while we were at the estate though - yummy! Our guide shown here (Cindy) was great! They don't hardly any electricity here at all. Everything is done in the old style way. They have 1500 people from Nicaragua that come down during the coffee picking time to pick only the red berries. This also keeps the quality quite high. I guess it gets pretty crazy around there because they come and bring their whole families. There is definitely some prejudice against these people as they come in and many cause problems. It's the typical issue with the lower class.
We read something before coming to this coffee estate saying that Starbucks is coming down to Costa Rica to 'teach the locals' how to make high quality coffee. This is BS as Costa Rica is known for being the ones that produce the highest quality coffee. Starbucks is likely just trying to come down and get cheap coffee so they don't have to buy it from Doka anymore. I'm sure it won't taste as good if they do!




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